A pro-independence blog by James Kelly - one of Scotland's five most-read political blogs.
Saturday, November 2, 2024
Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide
Tonight, Matthew, BMG stands for "Bong! Majority's Gone": Labour fall behind in a GB-wide poll for the first time since 2021
The general assumption is that Kemi Badenoch is just minutes away from becoming leader of the Conservative Party, and I expect that assumption to prove correct - although other types of election have proved highly unpredictable in recent years, ballots of Tory members have always played out exactly as billed. If so, Badenoch will surprisingly be inheriting an outright Tory lead, and the question now is whether Tory leads will become the norm over the next four or five years. In spite of her own obvious shortcomings, that may well be the case.
BMG poll of GB-wide voting intentions (30th-31st October):
Labour 28%
Reform UK 17%
Liberal Democrats 13%
Greens 8%
The fieldwork dates for the poll were the day of the Budget and the day after, although the impression given is that it's a post-Budget poll, ie. the Wednesday fieldwork started after Rachel Reeves had finished her speech. If so, this is particularly disappointing for Labour, because it suggests that what they thought of as their trump card hasn't staved off crossover.
That said, there's also a Techne poll with similar fieldwork dates showing a slight increase in the Labour lead, albeit well within the margin of error and statistically insignificant.
Between the Trussmageddon of September 2022 and the general election of July 2024, the Tories never even came close to claiming the lead in a single poll. They seemed to have Everest to climb, and yet it's taken only four months of the public seeing what Starmer is actually like in power for that Everest to be climbed. In Scotland the hope must be that this will translate into a sustained SNP lead.
Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Has the Reeves Budget produced anything that would stand in the way of an SNP win in 2026?
Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article at The National about whether Rachel Reeves' first Budget today will help to arrest Labour's tumble in popularity. You can read it HERE.
Tuesday, October 29, 2024
The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed
Sunday, October 27, 2024
Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024: The Final Push
Click here to go straight to the fundraiser page.
This is 'take two' for the 2024 fundraiser's final push, because as you might remember I attempted a post like this a couple of weeks ago, but literally just an hour after I published it, the tragic news came through that Alex Salmond had died. However, I can't put off returning to the issue for any longer, because financial realities are what they are, and I think realistically I would need to raise a minimum of an additional £800 within the next two weeks or so to keep the blog afloat on the same basis that it's been operating for many years. I can't delay the decision beyond that very tight timescale, because I'm in a situation that will be horribly familiar to many of you, ie. the numbers are just not quite adding up, and if I'm going to keep going, I'll need to keep the lights on and I'll need to eat.
To reiterate the points that I always make about fundraising: no, Scot Goes Pop is not my sole income, in spite of the constant "why not get a job" sneering from the trolls. I'm sure that's self-evident to most sensible people, because the target figure for the annual fundraiser is always well below what is generally needed to live on. I have multiple other income streams, but for a variety of reasons they aren't bringing in as much as they did prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately that sharp downward turn coincided with the problem of the post-2021 fundraisers repeatedly failing to meet their targets. It's been a perfect storm, and consequently for the last three years I've been lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis. What the fundraiser money always used to do was give me enough flexibility to just drop everything and blog at length whenever a poll came out or whenever a major story broke, regardless of whether that was at 11am on a weekday or midnight on a Saturday. In other words, the non-blogging work that I do is mostly freelance and ad hoc, and I fit it around the blogging when required.
Why are the fundraisers proving such a struggle these days, when they never were prior to 2021? I'm sure it's partly due to the cost of living crisis, but it must also be partly down to my decision to join the Alba Party in the spring of 2021. That seemed to displease almost everyone, because SNP supporters didn't like it but strangely many Alba supporters weren't much happier either. I was a relative moderate within the party - I didn't think we should be waging total war against Nicola Sturgeon or attempting to totally destroy the SNP, and I was very troubled about the chatter over restricting the voting rights of English people living in Scotland. Some of the harder line Alba members clearly didn't think there should be room for someone like me in the party, and regarded me with severe mistrust.
Hopefully, if there's one silver lining from Chris McEleny's apparent determination to expel me from Alba, it's that nobody can mistake me any longer for a partisan drone. I literally have no idea what I will do after my likely expulsion. There are three basic options - a) apply to rejoin the SNP, b) apply to join a smaller pro-indy party, or c) try to assist in setting up something new, and I am genuinely and totally undecided about which of those three would be best. My mind has almost been like a war zone trying to work it out, and I wish to goodness the Alba powers-that-be would just do the decent thing and drop the malicious proceedings against me so that my dilemma would vanish in a puff of smoke, but I very much doubt that will happen. So there's little point trying to pin labels on me just now when none really fit.
If I'm unable to raise enough over the next couple of weeks and I have to "stop" blogging, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete cessation, because I would always get a bee in my bonnet about something or other and have a burning desire to blog about it. However, Scot Goes Pop would revert to being a hobby as it was when I started it way back in 2008, and I would imagine there might be two or three posts a month at the absolute most.
But let's accentuate the positive. What can readers look forward to if the fundraiser does raise just about enough to keep things going into 2025? Above all else, of course, there'll be extensive polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective. We're potentially in quite an exciting phase of the electoral cycle, as the public seem to have decisively concluded that the Labour government is a dud, meaning that instead of the SNP being caught in the death spiral that so many unionist commentators predicted prior to the general election, they're actually showing signs of recovery. That could set the scene for a much more favourable outcome in the 2026 Holyrood election than we dared to hope for even a few weeks ago. I'd like Scot Goes Pop to be around to tell that story - because I'm not sure we can rely on the unionist mainstream media to tell it for us.
Secondly, although I'm not impartial about independence, you can rely on me to blog about my own honest views without fear or favour. I've resisted the menacing demands (which you've probably seen repeatedly in the comments section) for me to turn Scot Goes Pop into an Alba propaganda blog in return for avoiding expulsion, and neither am I interested in being an SNP leadership drone. I just call things exactly as I see them, and frankly that does set me apart from some (but not all, I hasten to add) of the most prominent pro-indy bloggers.
And no promises, but it would be nice to revive the Scot Goes Popcast - it was going really well for a year or so, with some cracking guests, but again, that was another victim of my decision to join Alba, because SNP and Green people started to blanket-refuse my invitations, not wanting to be associated with an "Alba blogger". But if I'd been more persistent, I probably could have found some takers, so I might have another crack at it.
And of course there's the possibility of another Scot Goes Pop poll at some point. In fact I'll have to get that done eventually even if I do stop blogging, because my last attempt at fundraising specifically for a poll ended up in no-man's-land with some funds raised but not enough to go ahead. One way or another I'll get it done somehow!
To put in perspective what would be needed to keep Scot Goes Pop going, as I write this the running total on the fundraiser page is £3764. Another £800 would take it to £4564, so that's a rough guide to where the total would need to be two weeks from now if this final push is to be just about a success. Obviously more would be better and would give me more of a cushion, but I've got to be realistic and we'll see if another £800 can be managed.
Thank you to everyone who has already donated. If you haven't donated yet and would like to, there are three main options.
To donate by card, please follow this link to the fundraiser page on GoFundMe.
To donate via PayPal, simply make a direct payment to my PayPal email address, which is: jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk
To donate via direct bank transfer, please contact me by email and I'll send you the necessary details. My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter profile or in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version of the site only).
People sometimes ask about fees: GoFundMe now rely on tips to make a profit, but the payment processor they use does still directly deduct a small percentage from donations. So if you want to avoid fees completely, please select either the PayPal or bank transfer option (and if you choose PayPal, select the non-fee option from the menu). PayPal also has the advantage of (usually) transferring the funds instantly, whereas with GoFundMe there is a delay of at least several days.